After a sudden brain wave last week I had been googling to see if anyone of the mechanical keyboard models had easily modifiable firmware and realized that the very keyboard I was typing on had a removable daughter board… and there was already a ATmega32U2 (note U2 & not U4) replacement controller available for it called the Frosty Flake.

I ordered one of these and will be documenting my changes to the firmware here. Here are a few photos of it next to the original board (thinner and flimsier).

I also decided to remove the top plastic cover on my keyboard to give it a more naked look and taped up the controller to avoid shorting it. I plan to make a transparent acrylic laser cut cover for the Frosty Flake.

I recently got an Intel Core i3-4130 variant of the TS140 for a great price ($230) and have set it up as my home Linux file server, which I intend to put to use to replace a Synology NAS that I am using currently.

This place holder post will get more details of the setup over the next few weeks.

I received the WaterColorBot last December (that I had ordered from EMSL through Kickstarter) and have been having fun using it in RoboPaint.

As I read more about the EBB board being used to drive the two stepper motors and the servo I was surprised to find out that serial over USB seemed to currently be the only way to connect to the PIC18 board. So I decided to see if I could supplement the serial USB with a direct 3.3v UART interface. This would allow direct control of the EBB projects from other micro-controllers without having to store the motions in the EBB firmware.

I am currently reading through the firmware I downloaded from the EggBot google code repository, and have also been able to download the toolchain and flash the board with a modified firmware following instructions from here. This is also my first foray into PIC18 programming. I will update next when I some something more substantial than just an intention (unlike this time).

One of the first things I did here was to figure out how to connect to the EBB board over usb emulated serial. I had to read through the source code for robotpaint-rt to figure out the baud rate.

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